


Stitches

by MrsWhozeewhatsis (OxfordCommaLover)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 01:43:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20037841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordCommaLover/pseuds/MrsWhozeewhatsis
Summary: Dean learns a valuable skill that serves him well through most of his life, except for the one time it doesn’t.





	Stitches

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in the works for... *counts on fingers and several toes* almost a year and a half. It got lost in my last move, and I finally got a few minutes to finish it up and get it out before my next move. Special thanks to @littlegreenplasticsoldier and @manawhaat for being the best beta readers a girl could ask for. If my writing shines, it’s because of them.

The first time Dean picked up a needle and thread to sew something other than his father’s skin, he was nine years old, almost ten. They had started at a new school, Sammy in first grade, and a bully had pushed him down onto the ground during recess. Sam had wisely let it go, even though he knew how to defend himself, but the altercation had left him with a rip in his new shirt. There wasn’t anything special about the shirt, it was just a regular button-down shirt with a pocket on the chest, but Sam loved it because it was _his_. It was the first shirt he’d gotten that was _his_ shirt straight from the store, not a hand-me-down from Dean. It wasn’t used-to-be-Dean’s; it was his, and his alone. That it was ruined on its first day upset Sam like nothing else had since Dad was late for Christmas the previous year.

Sam tried to be a man about it, didn’t cry or whine, but he was so quiet that night that it gave Dean the creeps. Sam just balled the ruined shirt up and tossed it in the trash can before flopping onto his bed with his back to the room, his face buried in his pillow.

When Sam’s snores were deep and even, Dean pulled the shirt from the trash and looked over the tear. It was right along the seam under the arm, so even if it was fixed poorly, Dean decided, it wouldn’t be too noticeable. Wanting nothing more than to make his little brother smile again, Dean pulled out the first aid kit where they kept the needle and thread and got to work.

He was halfway done when Mrs. Minkus, the motel manager who was ‘keeping an eye on them’, stopped by to check in. She spied the shirt sitting on the table, its baby blue plaid marred by the line of uneven black stitches and cocked a knowing eyebrow at Dean.

“Your daddy hasn’t taught you the finer points of mending a shirt, yet, has he?” she asked, picking up the shirt and inspecting the rip more closely.

“No, ma’am,” Dean replied, knowing never to say more than what’s required with strangers, not even harmless Mrs. Minkus.

She sat down in the chair next to the one Dean had been working from and gestured for him to sit, too. “For someone who has obviously never touched a needle and thread before, you didn’t do too badly. However, I’m going to take out what you’ve done so I can show you how to do it properly. It’s not hard, and it’s a skill worth knowing.” She kept chatting while she undid all of Dean’s hard work, making him scowl. “Nowadays, everyone just throws things away, but in my day, we didn’t have enough money to just go and buy something new. An inch of thread and an ounce of time are cheaper than a new shirt, you know.”

Dean considered the already dwindling stash of cash John had left for groceries, and how much buying yet another new shirt for Sam would cost. Mrs. Minkus was right. Not only would this make Sam happy, but this would also keep food in his belly. It might even come in handy the next time his dad was bleeding, too. He erased the frown from his face and leaned in close to watch skilled hands and learn.

The next morning, Sam was ecstatic about his shirt being fixed, and he launched himself at Dean to thank him. Every night for the rest of the week that they stayed there, Mrs. Minkus would bring by her own mending pile, so Dean could practice. She guided his fingers through difficult stitches, taught him how to sew on a button so it wasn’t too tight, and was about to teach Dean how to darn a sock when John packed them up to leave. As a parting gift, she slipped a modest sewing kit into Dean’s backpack as they checked out. It had 10 different needles and 50 different colors of thread, along with tiny scissors, 20 plain buttons, a dozen snaps, a thimble, a bunch of straight pins, and a tiny pincushion shaped like a strawberry.

Dean pushed that sewing kit to the bottom of his bag, underneath his knife and an envelope that held pictures of his mom.

***

The first time Dean faced down a sewing machine, he lost. He was thirteen years old, now, and in his first Home Ec. Class. A small part of him was excited to learn how to make his own clothes. Even John had been impressed at how well Dean could repair the worst of his ripped shirts and clapped him on the back when he saved yet another one from needing to be replaced. What if he could sew clothes from scratch? Everyone in the class, including the boys, had to make an apron to start. He had no problem with the measuring or cutting the fabric according to the pattern, and learning about selvage and grain put words and structure to the random bits of knowledge he’d taught himself up to that point. The sewing machine, though, seemed out to get him.

It took him six tries to thread the damn thing the right way, and then, once he had it threaded, he kept bunching up his fabric, somehow. His apron looked like something out of a Dali painting by the time he was done. He played it cool, especially in front of the other boys in the class, stating loudly that it was ‘a girl thing’ he’d never need to know, anyway. Deep inside, though, he was disappointed in himself. He could shoot a tin can off a fence at a hundred yards and already did half of the maintenance on the Impala, though his dad still supervised. Why couldn’t he do this?

His loud mouth got him held after class, of course. Ms. Friedkin glared at him over her reading glasses while everyone else filed out of the room, oohing and crowing that he was in trouble. When the room was empty, she closed the door and sat down on the desk in front of his, taking off her glasses and chewing on the earpiece while she looked him over.

“I’m very disappointed to hear the things you said in class today, Mr. Winchester. In this day and age, I thought such a sexist mindset was behind us. After you did so well with the cooking unit, and seemed to enjoy it, too, hearing you say what you did makes me reevaluate you.”

Dean squirmed, keeping his eyes on his hands. He loved the cooking unit and had basked in the praise Ms. Friedkin had lavished on him. She’d complimented his cookies and said his spaghetti was perfect. He _liked_ her. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to disappoint a teacher. He knew the best thing was to get angry, tell her she was stupid and that he wasn’t worth her time, so she wouldn’t get her hopes up, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t yell at her. So, he stayed still, staring at his hands, wishing she’d just _let it go_.

She didn’t.

Instead of lecturing him on feminism and sending him out the door, she stared at him until Dean wanted to crawl out of his skin. Finally, she got up and grabbed his apron from the pile on her desk, bringing it over to him.

“You seemed to be doing okay with this project until today. What caught you up?”

Dean glared at the offending pile of mangled fabric. “I thought the sewing machine would be like my dad’s car and it would all just make sense,” he snapped, throwing his hands in the air. “But it doesn’t! And when I finally got the thing loaded right, it just kept getting away from me!” He slumped back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at the desk, again. “It’d be easier to do it by hand, without the stupid machine.”

Ms. Friedkin’s eyes lay heavily on Dean, and he fought the urge to squirm again.

“Well, the point of the lesson was for you to learn how to make something from scratch, and part of that is learning to use the machine. Although your seams aren’t as straight as some of your classmates’, they’re not the worst I’ve ever seen. You said it would be easier to sew it by hand?”

Dean nodded, taking a chance and glancing up at his teacher.

“You ever sew anything by hand before?”

Dean nodded again. “I fix all our clothes when they get ripped. Saves money,” he grunted with a shrug.

Ms. Friedkin was quiet for a long moment.

“From what I hear, your dad moves around a lot for work. Your transcript says this is your third school this year. I’m guessing that with all that moving, there’d be no chance of you ever having a sewing machine at home. Am I right?”

Dean scoffed. “Yeah, there’s no way.”

Ms. Friedkin smiled. “Then teaching you how to sew by hand seems more valuable than teaching you to use a machine you’ll never see again.”

Dean looked up at her with a slight squint and suspicion in his eyes. “Definitely.”

Her smile softened, and she pushed the apron into Dean’s hands. “Then I’ll make you a deal. Fix this by hand and turn it in at the beginning of our next class. That gives you two days to rip out all the seams and stitching and sew it back together by hand. Think you can do that?”

Dean nodded, eyes wide with wonder.

“Good. Do that,” she said, standing up from where she’d been leaning on the desk and dismissing him with a wave. “You can go. I know your brother’s waiting for you.”

Dean stuffed the apron into his backpack and ran out the door, throwing a relieved ‘Thanks’ over his shoulder. He didn’t sleep much the next two nights as he used the teeny scissors from his sewing kit to rip out every stitch, and then carefully put the apron back together again, each new stitch neat and tidy. He got to class early to hand it in and felt pride when Ms. Friedkin raved about his needlework. “Mr. Singer himself couldn’t tell the difference,” she said and gave him an A.

***

John Winchester was a tall man. Not quite as tall as Sam, but tall enough that his feet would hang over the end of a bed. Dean stared at the array of cheap sheet sets in the downtown Sioux Falls Walmart, trying not to think about his father’s corpse in a body bag in the back of Bobby’s truck. Trying not to think about who he was doing this for. For anyone else, a single twin-sized flat sheet would easily make a decent shroud, but Dean’s father was larger than life, in every way. One twin sheet wouldn’t get the job done. With a noise that was definitely not a sniffle, he grabbed a set of king-sized sheets and headed for the exit.

The rhythmic thunks of Sam’s axe hitting trees lulled Dean’s brain into a dull static while he cut the sheet in half and worked carefully to sew it back together in a way that would best accommodate his father. Sam worked his anger out by splitting wood; Dean worked to sew up his emotions with his needle and thread. 

With each stitch, he pushed his father’s last words into the shroud. The whole speech leading up to them paled in comparison, and he punched the needle through the fabric as they echoed through his mind. _“Save Sam, because if you can’t save him, you might have to kill him.”_ In his fury and despair, Dean stabbed himself with the needle, forcing him to drop everything to prevent the blood from getting everywhere.

While Dean was at the kitchen sink, cleaning the wound and digging for the med kit in Bobby’s junk drawer, Sam walked in the back door, grabbed a beer, and flopped down at the kitchen table.

“What happened?”

“Nothin’. Just poked myself like I always do,” Dean replied, digging through the kit. There was plenty of gauze and tape for use on claw marks and gunshot wounds, but nothing small enough for a needle stick. He tossed it back in the drawer and grabbed a paper towel from the rack, twisting it around his hand and making a fist to apply pressure until the bleeding stopped. With his makeshift bandage in place, he settled back down in his chair and picked up his work, not looking at his brother.

Dean felt Sam’s eyes on him while he worked, but kept his own eyes on the needle, not wanting to stab himself a second time. _Not wanting to think about why he’d stabbed himself the first time. _Especially with Sammy watching him.

“I think I’ve got enough wood out there, so we just need to stack it. You almost finished there?”

Dean grunted, shifting the miles of fabric around on the table to show Sam his progress. “Gettin’ there.”

Sam ran a hand over the hem Dean had stitched to stop the ragged edge from fraying. “You didn’t need to do all this, man. It’s all just gonna get wrapped up and burned, anyway.”

Dean sighed. “It’s for Dad. Do it right or not at all.” He swallowed his frustration at his little brother. Sam had never understood how meticulous Dean tried to be with his sewing. A half-assed mending job looked like just that. Take a little more time, and you make something look like new again. Dean had never half-assed a stitch after Mrs. Minkus taught him how to do it right, and he wasn’t about to start now.

Sam shook his head, drained his beer, and headed back outside to build the pyre. Dean put the final few stitches in place, tied off the thread, and put everything back in his kit. The modest kit that Mrs. Minkus had given him so many years ago had been replaced with a tin box that Dean had found in one of the junkers in the salvage yard when he was helping Bobby one summer as a kid. It was big enough to hold some proper scissors and a needle threader on top of all of the other supplies he’d amassed over the years. He’d narrowed his thread colors down to five, but he had buttons of all sizes, fabric tape, iron-on patches, and some spare shoelaces. He could fix anything on the fly, now.

Well, almost anything.

A deep breath taken in, then let out slowly pushed away the wave of grief so he could focus on what he needed to do next. He laid the sheet out next to the body bag in the bed of Bobby’s truck, opened the bag, and rolled his father onto the shroud. Carefully, he wrapped his father’s body the way he’d been taught at his first hunter’s funeral so many years before. Fold over the feet, fold over the head, fold in from the sides, and wrap ties around the ankles, knees, waist, and neck. No matter what Sam said, every step, every detail, was important. More important than anything else. Fix the sheet. Wrap the body. Douse the pyre in salt and gasoline. Make sure it burns evenly. Make sure the flames don’t spread. Rake the coals to make sure everything burns completely. Bury the ashes. Everything had to be done just right or it would all fall apart, and no amount of careful stitching would pull it back together, again.

***

Dean stared at his little brother’s body on the moldy mattress in the long-abandoned shack outside of Cold Oak. He’d finally scared Bobby off, but his words still hung in the air. Bobby’s voice in his mind listed everything he needed to do. Get sheets. Stitch them together because Sammy was half-giant like Dad. Cut down half a forest. Build a pyre. Wrap….

No.

Dean shook his head and wiped tears from his eyes.

Lay the sheet out. Place the body on the sheet. Fold the bottom edge up over the feet. Fold the top edge down over the head, covering the face. Covering his little brother’s…. 

_No!!!_

Dean choked on his grief, bile rising up in his throat until he could taste it in the back of his mouth.

_You’ve done this before. You did it for your father. Time to do it for Sammy._

No.

Dean had done a lot of mending for his little brother throughout their lives, but this was the one time he just couldn’t. He couldn’t stitch together the hole in the back of Sam’s shirt, much less the hole in Sam’s back, and he definitely couldn’t stitch together a shroud for his baby brother. Nothing he could do with a needle and thread would make this right.

But he could make it right.

With a screech of Baby’s tires, he drove to the nearest crossroads. Digging through the trunk, he found the box that held his sewing supplies and dumped it out, letting buttons and needles and everything else fall where they may. He grabbed what he needed for the summoning and buried it in the middle of the road.

Instead of needle and thread, he’d use a box filled with graveyard dirt and cat bones with a touch of yarrow. It might not be as perfect as his sewing, but it would mend his world.


End file.
